Network visualizations as group awareness tools for computer-supported collaborative learning on social media

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) provide rich contexts for learners to interact with each other and with various technological, instructional, and knowledge artifacts (e.g., web apps, learning resources) to jointly accomplish a learning goal. Social media platforms, especially social networking sites (SNS), help foster these interactions through features for communication and resource sharing. Yet they tend to lack some features for meaningful CSCL discussions, such as contextual cues that help learners know more about their co-learners. One way to overcome this is through group awareness tools that visualize key social and cognitive information about group members (e.g., activity, level of knowledge) to help groups establish a common frame of reference.
The four studies included in this work contribute to research about group awareness tools by exploring their usefulness during CSCL on social media. In particular, they explored how network visualizations, which represent relations between actors in a social network, can be used as group awareness tools that depict relations between learners and artifacts in CSCL environments. Network visualizations are used in social network analysis (SNA) to measure and represent structural relations. Although a promising method, SNA is relatively less-established in CSCL compared to learning analytics, a related field that uses techniques to perform analysis on learning-related data and transforms them into applications to impact learning.
Studies 1 and 2 are literature reviews of SNA as a technique to reveal important actors and relations in CSCL. Their results show that studies have limited their understanding of CSCL to direct interaction (i.e., communication) between learners. As such, they do not take into account mediated interactions between learners and artifacts in their environment. It had further emerged that messages exchanged between learners are a prominent knowledge artifact in CSCL environments. Based on these results, Studies 3 and 4 investigate network visualizations as applications in CSCL, namely as group awareness tools that visualized knowledge artifacts (i.e., terms from learners' messages) as cognitive information in a network graph (i.e., SNA as an application). These tools were evaluated in field studies to support collaborative argumentation on SNSs. The results suggest that although the tools led learners to exchange arguments with non-friends and develop awareness of multiple perspectives, these did not necessarily lead to multiple-perspective taking. The networked arrangement of group information emphasized similarities in cognitive information. This finding is different from other group awareness tools that tend to highlight dissimilarities, which learners could discuss in order to reduce any disparities. Future CSCL studies that use SNA should thus consider exploring learner-artifact interactions in order to better contextualize the relations beyond direct communication. Moreover, future studies should look into combining the tools with argumentation scripts that help learners consider the merits of discussing dissimilar cognitive information.

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